dozens of them sizzling into her being, rewriting her very existence in an instant…
She nearly shrieked in agony. She’d always known hierophantic commands were different. But she’d never had any idea how different.
She heard Berenice screaming in pain.
“Do not break away!” warned Valeria. “Must maintain!”
“I can’t!” cried Berenice. “To have this done to me…it hurts!”
“Maintain!” said Valeria.
Another string of sigils—perhaps a dozen, perhaps a hundred, Sancia didn’t know. The burning characters unscrolled upon her being, and she felt them changing her very reality like her body and mind were clay to be lopped off or re-formed at a whim…
If this is just an echo of the scriving, she thought through the agony, then God…God, what must it actually be like to be part of a hierophantic command?
Berenice screamed again in pain. Not thinking, Sancia opened her eyes.
And then she saw her.
A woman of about thirty was sitting in the middle of the basement, covered in blood and sobbing hysterically. Cradled in her lap was a boy of around eleven or twelve years old, and he was very clearly dead. The back of his head bore a tremendous wound, an unsettlingly dark, viscous purple cavity just behind his right ear.
Sancia realized she knew this woman. She had met her just days ago, weeping and trembling in the depths of the galleon: Ofelia Dandolo, though the specter she saw now was thirty or forty years younger than the woman she’d met.
Ofelia shook the child in her lap, as if trying to wake him. His head rolled to the side, and Sancia saw his face.
The sight took her breath away. His face was set in the angelic, untroubled expression all children assumed when sleeping, spoiled only by the slow creep of blood on the side of his head. But most of all, he looked so much like Gregor, but so young, so delicate…
And yet, she somehow knew it was not Gregor. This boy was too skinny, too frail, and his eyes were too far apart.
Domenico Dandolo?
“Come back to me!” screamed Ofelia. She shook him violently, and blood began to spill from the boy’s mouth. “Come back to me, please, please!”
Sancia shut her eyes again, and she and Berenice both moaned in terror.
“It must almost be complete!” said Valeria. “Do not break away now! Maintain connection!”
“Berenice,” said Sancia. “Please tell me you’re remembering all these goddamn sigils!”
“How could I forget them?” sobbed Berenice.
boomed Crasedes’s voice in their minds.
Another burst of sigils, this time the most yet, the flashes of characters pouring into Sancia’s mind again and again.
It was almost too much. She felt her own sense of time growing soft, flattening out, dissolving. It was one thing to have your reality rewritten, but another to have a command attempt to shift your time back to an instance that, for you, did not exist—for she and Berenice, after all, could not be skipped back to a past instance in Gregor’s time.
It was all wrong. It was like being fed through a vast, malfunctioning machine, its pistons and gears tearing into your flesh…
“Berenice!” she cried. “Stay with me!”
“I’m here! But…Sancia…I can’t take this for much longe—”
Then they heard a voice before them, husky and cracked: “M-Momma?”
Sancia and Berenice opened their eyes.
Gregor was gone. The chair was gone.
In their place was a small boy of about seven, lying on a bed, his face streaked with mud, his leg badly broken. Sancia’s hand was pressed to his forehead, and when he blinked and looked at them she gasped and nearly drew it away.
The boy whispered, “Momma? What’s…What’s happened, Momma?”
“Ohh, what the hell,” said Sancia.
The voice of Ofelia Dandolo came floating through, as if from some distant hallway: “Hush, darling…Hush. We’ve given you a draught. Just…sleep.”
“Where’s Papa? Where’s Domenico? What happened?” The child blinked and looked around the basement.
“Your father is…gone,”